this body

Photo by Ahmad Odeh

This body.
A body I call, “mine,”
but she doesn’t belong to ‘me.’
We belong to each other,
she and I.

There is no ownership here.
It is not a soul
in a body
or a body
with a soul.

We are in relationship.
My body and me.
And… we dance
on the sharp edge
of the space between things.

She wants to please me,
because I am her beloved.
She attends to me
and keeps me safe.
She is my vessel.
I am her muse.

It can be difficult
to re-member,
though,
that
we’re the best of friends,
my body and me.

In utero,
I ingested a shadow.
Stories from my mother,
my grandmothers…
my great grandmothers.
Infused in my mitochondria,
myths of conditional self love,
and a woman’s place in the world.

I learned,
early on,
not to see my supple,
innocent flesh
with my own adoring and curious eyes.
For too long,
it has been hard to see
my body
as sacred,
beautiful,
and worthy.

Instead,
my emergence from the place
of no bodies
to embodied,
tattooed me with the karma
of an exploiting world
that had feverishly consumed
the wild spirits of the women
who came before me.

We are in relationship.
My body and me.
And… we dance
on a softening edge
of the space between things.

The call has come
for me to forgive
the burdens I carry
that do not belong to me.

The burden of broken bonds,
and frantic hearts,
steeped in numbing toxins.

Today,
I surrender a familiar hurt,
these his-toric resentments,
my wishing things were different.
My wishing my body was different.
This kind of wishing
did not save
my elders.
And it will not
save me.

We are in relationship.
My body and me.
I just have to re-member!
So we dance
on the sweet and supple stage
of the space between things.